In Episode 12 of his new book, author Julian Roup notes that Covid-19 deaths have topped 150,000.
In case you missed Episode 11, click here.
Life in a Time of Plague
Sussex, 17th & 18th April 2020
By Julian Roup
We decide to drive to a part of Five Hundred Acre Wood and walk down to inspect the place where my horse Callum almost did for me. But my car won’t start. The battery on my diesel CLS Mercedes is dead as a doornail. I will have to jumpstart it later and let it charge for a while. So Jan drives us out to the forest where Gus is delighted with the new territory and all its exciting new smells.
We have the place to ourselves, and its green incandescent trees shadowed with the emerging bluebells and the prehistoric looking fronds of bracken unfurling like the prow of Viking longships. In the deep woods, we stop and listen to the sound of the wind in the treetops; not a breath reaches the ground, where it is utterly still. We keep a look out for the resident buzzards, but they are absent. The day before, we saw one down the hill from the cottage doing circuits overhead, searching for prey. They have made serious inroads into the local snake population, and I can’t say I’m sorry that there are fewer adders around. I’m not a fan of snakes, and in the past we’ve had to rush cats and dogs to the vet for a shot against snakebite when paws have swollen up badly after a bite. Now it is the lizards that are doing well, says Terry, our nextdoor neighbour who looks after the farm. And the rabbits are coming back strongly too this year, he says.
After about a mile we get to the spot where Callum and I both lost our tempers and the evidence is still clearly visible on the ground in hoofmarks in the clay this side of the river and among the heavy leaf mould on the far bank, where his mighty leap took us. If ever one needed proof of his jumping pedigree, here it was. Both his sire and dam jumped internationally for Ireland and Germany. But Callum’s had an easy life with older riders, who have pootled him around English farms and countryside, the reason his legs are in such good nick.
Showing Jan the spot, and inspecting the area, I see a heavy low branch that we must have dodged, just too low for Callum to fit under, and I see the marks where he sidestepped it with a swerve. Had we hit that, I doubt I would be writing this.
Each day we keep a lookout for the swallows, but still nothing. With the author of Greenery, Tim Dee, I am currently keeping watch vicariously on the Rock of Gibraltar, for birds on the western Mediterranean Flyway returning from Africa. I am amazed by what passes him, flying low and flying high, and his intricate knowledge of the physical appearance, feeding habit, preferred home turf, winter and summer.
On my laptop this morning, I watch Tom Cunliffe, one of the greatest British sailors of his generation, speak about crossing the Atlantic in September back in 1973 with his wife, too late in the season to be wise. The Atlantic took its toll on them and their 70-year-old 32ft pilot cutter which had no engine, nor any of today’s modern navigational tools, mobile phone, satellite iridium phone, radar, GPS, AIS, nor anything much in the way of technology. They are forced to hove-to and mend a smashed tiller, which had pulled free from the rudder when waves “greybeards higher than the mast” tossed them around like a matchstick. He is currently in Coronavirus lockdown with his wife too, and doing talks to the yachting fraternity. It is a happy time for them he says, much like being at sea, reading, writing and cooking.
Speaking of cooking, my sister Jay who is no mean cook, emails as if she is reading my mind, something I think she is more than capable of: “Tonight it is masala ostrich meatballs on cabbage and roasted sweet potatoes.” Yum. Don’t think I’ve ever eaten ostrich. It does seem a terrible sadness to hear of these majestic birds ending up as meatballs. But that would not stop me trying the dish and doubtless finding it delicious. The ostrich is one of my totem animals, ever since on the day I finally finished my national service army training in Oudtshoorn, back in 1969, and pulled the car over onto the hard gravel shoulder to watch one of the most astonishing spectacles I’ve ever seen – ostriches in that desperately dry countryside dancing in the rain, wings outstretched. An image of joy, if ever I’ve seen one. I can remember crying for joy myself.
I’m going to walk down shortly to check on Callum in his field as he is barefoot for the first time since I’ve had him, almost a year now, as I’m not riding and he’d already shed one shoe in the field. Hopefully a month hence, I will get Matt Ely, the farrier to put his virtually unused set of shoes back on again and start riding. My waistline could do with the exercise. Thank God we can still walk.
Jan sends me a worrying cutting about food riots in South Africa and the police and army deployed to prevent this and other criminal activity during lockdown. The writer Abdul Kariem Matthews warns that if law-abiding folk start looting to enable them to eat to survive, there will be meltdown. He attaches a photograph of some black graffiti painted onto a white wall which reads: “Corona is the virus, Capitalism (heavily underlined) is the pandemic.”
Boris is still recuperating at Chequers, the PM’s country residence. The medical community are understandably at their wits’ end about a shortage, or rather a total lack of personal protective clothing. The BBC reports an hour ago that “Half of humanity is under social distancing curbs.” What a sobering thought.
As world coronavirus deaths pass 150,000, more than 4.5 billion people are under containment to slow the pandemic. Germany has just seen four days of increasing death tolls. Doctors in Japan say some hospitals are struggling to cope with the influx of patients, even turning ambulances away.
The UK death toll reached 14,576 on Friday as 847 new deaths were reported in hospitals, but these figures do not include the dead in nursing and retirement homes, nor those who’ve died at home. President Trump said US lockdown protesters were being treated “rough”, after calling for the “liberation” of some states. The WHO advised countries to plot a cautious path out of lockdown, rather than relying on antibody tests.
I have a major concern myself; I’m out of marmalade. This is no small thing, as my day starts with coffee then an hour later a second cup with buttered toast and marmalade, one of the great loves of my life. I’ve even written about it for Country Life. So this is no small thing. Jan promises to see if she can get some delivered, maybe in catering size like the bloody great jars of gherkins.
In Praise of Marmalade begins: “In the lemon light of an English morning, the orange marmalade glows like a church window with the compressed heat of a Spanish summer. In that jar of jellied fruit live a thousand memories of breakfast-in-bed mornings, of sunlight on a woven cream counterpane, of silence, and the rustle of pages turning; of your sun-kissed skin, your copper hair. It is a fragment of time, bitter sweet, like the shards of orange peel encased in amber.
“Marmalade, it is an English passion – just how they like it, bottled and kept beneath a lid for safety – a quiet secret indulgence, enjoyed early, with the rest of the day in which to recover. It is a passion I share, in this at least we are alike, my no longer new compatriots and I.”
I will need marmalade to survive lockdown!
Click here for Episode 13.